1

Adam Mendelsohn

Ethnics and Empire: Jewish Colonials in the mid-19th century

As befits a nation birthed from a penal colony, Australia and its Jews celebrate Moses

Joseph, a convict transported in 1827 for theft, as one of the founding fathers of the Jewish

community of Sydney. Within a handful of years of his arrival in the antipodes, Joseph had

amassed enough money to open a tobacconist shop – his wife, a free settler who followed him to

Australia, was, for legal reasons, his nominal employer – and began a meteoric rise that left him

a substantial landowner, pioneering industrialist, shipping tycoon, and leading gold buyer by the

early 1850s. Chained migration spurred the un-manacled variety: his success enticed a flotilla of

family members to sail for Australia and New Zealand. The fledgling Jewish community in

Sydney depended on his energy and largesse, as did a variety of other causes. (His fanciful coat

of arms – with “Jerusalem” in Hebrew at its center – appears in stained glass at the University of

Sydney flanked by those of colonial luminaries and Queen Victoria.) He was instrumental in

creating and supporting several Jewish institutions in the colonial port town, including its first

permanent synagogue and Jewish school. Joseph returned to England as a prosperous merchant –

he was granted an absolute pardon in 1848 – with his once-sullied image burnished by success.

In London he became a patron of Jewish causes, donating money to schools and other

institutions in the capital that sought to uplift and modernize Jewish life.1

Moses Joseph was not the only Jew who returned to England reinvented as a colonial

gentleman and with the newfound means to influence metropolitan Jewish life. He was part of a

small cohort of Jewish return migrants who, though now ostensibly men of leisure, were

generally not the retiring kind. Elevated in status and sought after for wealth earned under a

colonial sun, some became advocates of communal modernization and religious reform in the

middle decades of the 19th century. Within a Jewish community still dominated by an entrenched

1 Lawrence Nathan, As Old As Auckland: The History of LD Nathan & Co. Ltd and of the David Nathan family

1840-1980 (Auckland, 1984), 17; John Levi and George Bergman, Australian Genesis: Jewish Convicts and Settlers

1788-1850 (London, 1974), 226-227; Hilary Rubinstein, The Jews in Australia: A Thematic History. Volume One:

1788–1945 (Port Melbourne, Victoria, 1991), 413-414; John Levi, These are the Names: Jewish Lives in Australia,

1788-1850 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006): 371; Journal of the Legislative Council of New South

Wales, Session 1872 vol. xxi (Sydney: Thomas Richards, 1872); 746.

2

communal aristocracy whose authority rested on long-held wealth, prestige, and traditions of

noblesse oblige, some of these newly-wealthy colonials threw their weight behind efforts to

remake the community and its leadership. They were not alone in returning from the colonies

with firm ideas about the need for political and social change. Similar patterns were evident

among non-Jewish colonials who returned to the metropole. Yet in spite of the high rate of return

– by one estimate forty percent of all emigrants from England, two million in total, returned

between 1860 and 1914 – and the assertiveness of some of these returnees, relatively little work

has systematically assessed their influence.2

The impact of members of the new Jewish colonial elite who returned to Albion from the

settlement colonies is particularly striking when compared with that of Jews who rose to

positions of prominence in the Empire’s possessions in Asia. With a handful of important

exceptions, Jews of Asian origin were more notable for their absence from London society than

for their presence. Why did relatively few Jews from Britain’s empire in the East decamp to

London in the middle decades of the century? The answer is less obvious than it might at first

seem. For though Jews who returned from the settlement colonies were generally native-born

Englishmen and those who migrated from Asia to Albion were not, the latter were part of a small

stream of Indian subjects of the Crown who settled in England.3 It was not for want of

attachment to the Empire. In Burma, Aden, and India, Jews embraced the trappings of imperial

culture and in many cases sought an education in English for their children. It was not because

the colonial elite could ill-afford to settle in England. Several Jewish families in India attained

wealth unimaginable to the likes of Moses Joseph and his ilk, and sent their sons to the imperial

capital to establish branches of their expansive enterprises. Nor was it because they feared

rejection by London society. Some achieved a social rank far higher than all but the best of the

Anglo-Jewish elite – attaining a status far exceeding that of those who returned from Australia –

2 For an important exception see Marjory Harper, ed., Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants,

1600-2000 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). Note, however, that this volume focuses less on the

impact of returnees than on the motives and mechanisms of return. See also James Smithies, “Return Migration and

the Mechanical Age: Samuel Butler in New Zealand 1860-1864,” Journal of Victorian Culture 12: 12 (Autumn

2007): 203-224; Eric Richards, Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since

1600 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 169; John Darwin, “Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of

Territorial Expansion,” The English Historical Review, 112 ( June 1997), 169; Gary B. Magee and Andrew S.

Thompson, Empire and Globalisation (Cambridge, UK, 2010), 31, 64. 3 See Michael H. Fischer, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain 1600-1857 (Delhi:

Permanent Black, 2004), particularly chapters 7-10.

3

and were quickly incorporated into the inner circle of the Jewish aristocracy. Yet for all their

prosperity and prestige those who swapped humid Bombay for dank London appear to have been

less inclined to press for change within the Anglo-Jewish community than were the returnees

from the settlement colonies. So if money, culture, and their potential reception were seemingly

not insurmountable obstacles, why did comparatively few Jews from Britain’s colonial

possessions in Asia resettle in England? And why were they comparatively quiet when it came to

promoting reform in the religious and social life of Anglo-Jewry?

Until recently, historians were reticent on the reciprocal influences of empire on Jewish

life and Jews on the empire.4 Although Jews in the British Empire were only a tiny minority,

their experience can add to our understanding of several subjects that have attracted considerable

notice among those who study the Empire.5 Attention to Jews aids the efforts of those who have

pointed to the heterogeneity of the imperial project by identifying the ethnic and religious

diversity of the traders, missionaries, officials, and farmers who settled the Empire. Recognition

of the cultural, religious, familial, and mercantile connections that bound Jews in the metropole

to those in the colonies augments the arguments of those attuned to the operation of networks

within the imperial realm.6 And the careers of Moses Joseph and other colonial Jewish returnees

offers fresh perspective on the much-debated relationship between Britain and its colonies. Far

from being passive carriers of a metropolitan Jewish culture transplanted to distant shores,

Joseph and his fellow Jews in the settlement colonies were forced to adapt to the particular

challenges of being Jewish in colonial environments distant from major centers of Jewish life. As

4 This still applies, for the most part, to studies of the early Victorian period. Neither of the two best recent

reevaluations of Anglo-Jewish history—Todd Endelman’s The Jews of Britain, 1650 to 2000 (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 2002) and David Feldman’s Englishmen and Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994)—

makes any reference to South Africa, Jamaica or Australia in its index. The latter discusses the importance of

Empire—but only in the period following 1880. 5 At mid-century there were roughly 35,000 Jews in England, fewer than five hundred in British Canada, and around

100 in New Zealand, five and a half thousand in Australia in 1861, approximately 1,800 in Jamaica in 1871, and 375

in the Cape Colony in 1875. 6 On the heterogeneity of the imperial project see T.M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire: 1600-1815 (London: Penguin,

2004); John M. Mackenzie and T.M. Devine, eds., Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2011); Keith Jeffery, ed., ‘An Irish Empire’?: Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 1996); Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation

(Cambridge, UK, 2010), 135-136. On networks see Zoë Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 1815-1845: patronage, the

information revolution and colonial government (New York, 2005); Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: creating

identities in nineteenth-century South Africa and Britain (New York, 2001); Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in the

Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1820-1850 (Melbourne, 2005); Simon Potter, ed., Imperial Communication:

Australia, Britain and the British Empire (London, 2005).

4

we will see, this in turn shaped how they approached Anglo-Jewish society when they returned

to England after successful colonial careers.

Anglo-Jewry had already partaken in colonial commerce well before the Victorian age.

For more than a century prior, members of the Anglo-Jewish elite made and bolstered fortunes in

trading with India, North Africa, the Levant, the Mediterranean and the Caribbean.7 Such

opportunities required capital and connections; most Jews in England struggled to make ends

meet as peddlers, artisans and petty shopkeepers. Some Jewish hawkers in London were at the

bottom end of an international distribution chain that sometimes included Jewish intermediaries.

Among the baubles sold by Jewish peddlers in the street trade were sponges from the Levant and

Adriatic, ostrich feathers from North Africa, and oranges and lemons, fruits of Mediterranean

commerce. Jews were also active in the port towns which serviced the British fleet (Dickens

described Portsmouth as a “Seaport Town principally remarkable for mud, Jews and sailors”):

cashing pay, acting as bankers and creditors to sailors and their families, selling slops aboard

ship, and even press-ganging men into service. 8 Yet in the first decades of the 19th century the

impoverished Jewish majority was many times more likely to encounter the colonies as

indentured servants, transported criminals, and subjects to be shipped off in elite-sponsored

7 For a useful summary of Jewish involvement in international commerce, see Harold Pollins, Economic History of

the Jews in England (Rutherford NJ, 1982), 43-54. On trade with India see Gedalia Yogev, Diamonds and Coral:

Anglo-Dutch Jews and Eighteenth-Century Trade (New York, 1978), 124-180, 253-274. On trade with the Maghreb,

see Daniel Schroeter, The Sultan’s Jews: Morocco and the Sephardi World (Stanford, 2002), 71-87. On the

Caribbean trade see Stephen Fortune, Merchants and Jews: The Struggle for British West Indian Commerce, 1650-

1750 (Gainesville, 1984), 73-77, 94-98, 130-150 and Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 22-43. On the

Levantine trade see Eliezer Bashan, “Contacts between Jews in Smyrna and the Levant Company of London in the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” Jewish Historical Studies, 29, 1986: 53-73 and Endelman, Jews of Georgian

England, 24. On the Mediterranean trade see TM Benady, “The role of Jews in the British colonies of the Western

Mediterranean”: Jewish Historical Studies, 33, 1994: 48, 52. 8 On Jewish hawkers selling sponges, see Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, Volume 1

(London, 1861), 442-443. On the sale of oranges and lemons see ibid, 61, 79, 81, 86-89. The peddling of lemons

declined as the citrus became a profitable commodity, the result of the passage of a law which required foreign-

bound ships to be provided with lemon juice; ibid, 89. On the supply of sponges from Smyrna, Rhodes, Beirut, and

Greece see James McCoan, Our New Protectorate: Turkey in Asia (London, 1879), 82, 115, 118-120; John

MacCulloch, A dictionary, geographical, statistical, and historical (London, 1851), 968. On Jewish involvement in

the wholesale of these products by the 1850s, see Mayhew, London Labour, Volume 2, 118. On Jewish involvement

in the sponge trade see Frankel, Damascus Affair, 70; Pollins, Economic History, 107. On the North African Jewish

trading network which supplied ostrich feathers to London see Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Mediterranean Jewries and

Global Commerce in the Modern Period: On the Trail of the Jewish Feather Trade,” Jewish Social Studies: History,

Culture, Society, 13, 2: 1-39.

5

colonization schemes than as direct participants in colonial ventures.9 This pattern began to shift

when an increasingly industrialized (and acquisitive) Britain rediscovered its appetite for

colonization, establishing settlement colonies at the Cape and antipodes, and steadily

accumulating and consolidating territory and control in South Asia and the Far East. This second

British Empire presented a far larger set of opportunities to a wider swathe of Jews at home and

abroad than did its earlier imperial forays.10 Demand from the colonies stimulated metropolitan

markets; Jews in England were fortuitously positioned in a number of marginal niches that were

boosted by the imperial economy. Others were drawn as immigrants to Australia, Canada, and

South Africa by the promise of a fresh start away from the slums of London. And in Britain’s

eastern Empire – Aden, India, Burma, and the treaty ports of China – a Jewish population with

roots in the East found a lucrative niche servicing the needs of the Empire.

Moses Joseph was not alone in starting his life anew in the antipodes as a convict – he

was one of at least 384 Jewish chained migrants transported to Australia between 1788 and 1830

– but he and his fellow Jewish felons were soon outnumbered by free settlers. A striking

percentage of those who joined them in Australia in the 1830s were scions of leading Sephardic

and Ashkenazi families. As many as a third of early voluntary Jewish migrants to the antipodes

belonged to the British communal aristocracy. The expanding settlement colonies of the British

Empire provided an alluring prospect for the sons and daughters of the Anglo-Jewish elite.11

Unlike the majority of their penurious fellow-immigrants to Australia, the scions of the de Pass,

Furtado, Mocatta, Montefiore, Phillips, and Samuel clans came as unfettered investors and

speculators. For footloose Joseph Barrow Montefiore, impatient at age 25 with his position as a

broker on the London Exchange (and overshadowed by his more successful and illustrious

9 The extent of Jewish poverty in eighteenth century England is discussed in detail in Endelman, Jews of Georgian

England, 31-32, 166-180. On transportation of Jews to the New World see Eric Goldstein, Traders and Transports:

The Jews of Colonial Maryland (Baltimore, 1993), 27-36; on colonization schemes, see Eli Faber, A Time for

Planting: The First Jewish Migration, 1654-1820 (Baltimore, 1992), 19-21 and Endelman, Jews of Georgian

England, 168-169. 10 On this transition, see P.J. Marshall, “Britain without America—A Second Empire?” in PJ Marshall, ed., The

Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume II: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 576-594. On the

historiographic debate about this periodization, see CA Bayly, “The Second British Empire” in Robin Winks, ed.,

The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume II: Historiography (Oxford, 1999), 60-64. On the economic

impact of Empire on Britain, see BR Tomlinson, “Economics and Empire: The Metropolitan Context” in Andrew

Porter, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume III: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999), 31-51.

For a useful summary of the changes within the Jewish economy see Vivian Lipman, Social History of the Jews in

England, 1850-1950 (London, 1954), 29-34. 11 Levi and Bergman, Australian Genesis, 199; Goldman, Jews in Victoria, 141.

6

cousin Moses), Australia was terra nova. The family was already active in the West India trade;

here was the means to establish his own colonial fortune.12 He arrived in 1829 to take possession

of a vast land grant, which he supplemented with a banking and export business in partnership

with his brother in London. During the boom years of the 1830s, Montefiore and his fellow

pedigreed immigrants prospered, sending Australian produce to London, and trading with the

United States, China, and the South Seas.13 Montefiore’s first Australian fortune, however,

collapsed in 1841, a victim of his overenthusiastic speculation and the looming economic

depression in the colony. The de Pass brothers, also men of elevated pedigree, encountered fewer

such headaches at the Cape. Aaron and Elias arrived in Cape Town in 1846, quickly ensconcing

themselves as pioneers of the coastal trade. Alongside interests in shipping, whaling and copper

mining, the brothers dominated the export of phosphorous-rich guano, harvested from the islands

that dotted the western coast of South Africa, to England and the United States. This natural

fertilizer was much in demand from farmers. The de Pass brothers distanced themselves from

their fowl reputations by giving generously to Jewish charities in Cape Town, and did the same

when they returned to London.14

If these sons of privilege were somewhat insulated from the jolting downturns that

periodically disrupted colonial growth—Montefiore returned to stake out a second fortune in

South Australia in 1846—they were far from alone in profiting from Empire. The settlement

colonies were remarkably open to enterprising immigrants drawn to commerce. Although the

rate of failure was high, settlers benefited from growing international demand for colonial

produce and an expanding domestic market driven by immigration. The settlement colonies

provided a relatively fluid economic and social environment, comparatively free of entrenched

competition and barriers to entry, enabling legions of Jewish settlers to transcend their humble

12 He was joined in Sydney by his nephew Jacob Levi Montefiore of Bridgetown, Barbados in 1837. See Jewish

World, January 30 and February 2, 1885; Levi and Bergman, Australian Genesis, 175. 13 See Levi and Bergman, Australian Genesis, 76, 196-201, 213-214, 297 14 On their business activities, see Louis Herrman, A History of the Jews of South Africa (Johannesburg, 1935), 123-

126; Lawrence Green, At Daybreak for the Isles (Cape Town, 1950), 80-82; Israel Abrahams, The Birth of a

Community (Cape Town, 1955), 32-33; Louis Hotz, “Contributions to Economic Development” in Gustav Saron and

Louis Hotz, eds., The Jews in South Africa: A History (Cape Town, 1955), 352. On guano export, see Edward

Napier, Excursions in South Africa (London, 1849), 324-325; E Littell, The Living Age, Volume XII (Boston, 1847)

173-174. For their provenance in London, see Albert Hyamson, The Sephardim of England (London, 1951), 294,

314, 336, 397. On their charitable giving, see JC, December 25, 1846; July 7, 1854; December 12, 1862; January 13,

1865.

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antecedents. Benjamin Norden and his four brothers, the sons of a petty shopkeeper in

Hammersmith, arrived in South Africa in 1820, sent by a scheme funded by the British

government to settle close to four thousand settlers as farmers on the disputed eastern frontier of

the Cape Colony. After failing as a farmer on soil better suited to grazing than cultivation,

Norden and many of his fellow migrants gravitated toward the towns and trading posts of this

unsettled province. After he established himself as an auctioneer in Grahamstown in 1829,

Norden dabbled in the lucrative trade with the Xhosa and Zulu, bartering beads, iron-wear and

guns for ivory and cattle. In 1840 he moved to Cape Town where he set himself up as a merchant

and concession agent, also sniffing opportunity in the guano trade.15 By the time Benjamin

Norden returned to London in 1858, he had firmly established himself as a prosperous colonial

gentleman, a patron of local causes and midwife in the difficult birth of the Cape Town

synagogue. His tenure in Cape Town had not been without its setbacks.16 He left behind a

reputation for extraordinarily litigiousness, noteworthy even by the elevated standards of colonial

lawsuits. (So important was credit to colonial businessmen that many were quick to resort to the

courts to protect their integrity, lest damage to their reputations harmed access to money at home

and abroad.)17

Benjamin Norden was by no means the only settler of modest background who returned

to Britain with a remade reputation. Several who left London stained by the poverty of the East

15 On the 1820 Settlers see Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa (New Haven, 2001), 55-56; Basil Le

Cordeur, The Politics of Eastern Cape Separatism (Oxford, 1981), 58. On trade on the Cape frontier see Timothy

Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (Charlottesville, VA, 1996), 68; Lester, Imperial

Networks, 55. For Norden’s trading expeditions and his business career, see DJ Kotzé ed.), Letters of the American

Missionaries, 1835-1838 (Cape Town, 1950), 19, 82, 91; Herrman, Jews in South Africa, l09-111. For Abraham

Norden, Benjamin’s father, see Henry Buckler, Central Criminal Court Minutes of Evidence, volume xiii (London

1840), 605. 16 His public image was more than a little dented in 1849 after he supplied the convict ship Neptune, anchored for

five months off the port town in a face-off between residents and the government over plans to establish a penal

colony at the Cape, in defiance of a local boycott. The ship, hailing from Bermuda, was to disembark convicts, a

first step toward establishing a penal colony. After extensive local protest—including an attack on Norden—the

government plan was thwarted, and the Neptune sailed for Van Dieman’s Land. On Norden and the Neptune affair,

see Shain, Antisemitism in South Africa, 9; Nigel Worden, Elizabeth Van Heyningen, Vivian Bickford-Smith, Cape

Town: The Making of a City (Cape Town, 1998), 175-177; McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies, 172-175; John

Mitchel, Jail Journal, or Five Years in British Prisons (New York, 1854), 202-209. On Samuel Rodolf, see

Herrman, Jews in South Africa, 113; A Minutes, Volume 1, Box 1, BC 849, Cape Town Hebrew Congregation

Archive, passim. 17 On the importance of personal reputation and litigation to defend personal integrity in the colonial environment

see McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies, 84-86; for court cases involving Jewish businessmen in Cape Town and

Sydney see 69-89. For a selection of Norden’s litigation, see CH Van Zyl, The Theory of the Judicial Practice of the

Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town, 1902), xxi.

8

End returned in triumph as prosperous colonial gentlemen. The colonies provided opportunity

for reinvention, enabling a minority of those who left Albion impecunious (or in shackles) to

return gilded by success. (As Lady Duff Gordon, visiting Cape Town in 1861, wryly remarked

“a change in hemisphere will reverse reputations.”)18 Others were able to wipe clean the taint of

failure. Jacob Phillips, bankrupted when his jewelry business failed in Birmingham in 1832,

revived his fortunes in Hong Kong in the 1840s. Phillips imported guns and other Birmingham

manufactures to the treaty port, and sent luxuries back home to be sold by his business partner.

The firm opened branch offices in Australia and the Philippines, which he staffed with family

members. Phillips returned to Birmingham in 1851 as a prosperous merchant, using his new

status to become a patron of communal and civic causes.19 Norden, Phillips and Moses Joseph

were among a cohort of prosperous colonial Jews who retired to England. London exercised a

powerful draw for successful colonists, offering access to culture and leisure unavailable in still

rough-and-ready colonial port cities, as well promising comfort and prestige to those who

returned with ample funds.

A striking number of those who returned to London as colonial worthies became

supporters of communal reform, providing funding, leadership, and endorsement to several new

welfare, educational, and religious initiatives. Their priorities were Jewish inflections on issues

that agitated other colonial returnees. Some colonists who became familiar with responsible and

accountable government, free education, and universal male suffrage at the edges of the Empire

pushed for the same in England.20

In several cases, support for religious reform among Jewish returnees involved support

for the contentious West London Synagogue of British Jews whose adoption of religious reforms

in the 1840s – a shorter prayer service, a new prayer book, and regular sermons in English –

18 On colonial self-reinvention, see McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies, 1-4, 9, quoted on 51. For other striking

cases of colonial economic success see Nathan, As Old As Auckland, 48-50; JC, July 30, 1897; Williams,

Manchester Jewry, 321-323. 19 See Birmingham Jewish Local History Study Group, “A Portrait of Birmingham Jewry in 1851,” in Aubrey

Newman, ed., Provincial Jewry in Victorian Britain (London, 1975); Geoffrey Alderman, Modern British Jewry

(Oxford, 1992), 30; John Langford, Modern Birmingham and its Institutions (Birmingham, 1877), 85; Pollins,

Economic History of the Jews in England, 107; George Elwick, The Bankrupt Directory (London 1843), 322;

Caroline Plüss, “Sephardic Jews in Hong Kong: Constructing Communal Identities,” Sino-Judaica, 4, 2003: 63. 20 See Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation, 31,

9

created fissures within the communal elite and challenged the authority of the Chief Rabbinate.

Those who had spent decades in the West Indies, antipodes or at the Cape may have become

inured of a less rigid religious environment and accustomed to exercising power within the

Jewish community. Distance diluted the authority of religious leaders in London. Moses Joseph,

the president of the York Street Synagogue in Sydney in 1845, remonstrated to the British Chief

Rabbi that it was all-but impossible to maintain traditional Jewish life in Australia. “[S]o far

distant as we, Reverend Sir, are from your guidance and considering the nature of our

congregation, you cannot expect we are very orthodox in all matters relating to our faith.” Delays

in the passage of letters provided congregations with significant latitude while they waited

months for responses to their questions. Local realities also demanded compromises. With a

gender imbalance in New South Wales weighted at two men for every woman in 1841, the

exclusion of the intermarried would doom the already foundering congregations.21 This problem

was not unique to Sydney and its surrounds, nor was it confined to poor members of the

community. Benjamin Norden, the leading light and major benefactor of the fractious

congregation in Cape Town—and the husband of a Christian wife—apparently saw no

contradiction between his communal role and his personal affairs.22 While intermarriage was the

most visible compromise with local circumstances, friction arose between hazans and colonial

congregations due to widespread apathy toward kashrut, mikvehs and synagogue attendance.

Many wealthy Jewish colonists had little patience for a meddlesome priest, particularly when

they held power over his paycheck, and had functioned without the services of a hazan for

lengthy periods.

Colonial grandees who returned to Britain swapped the autonomy of a free-wheeling and

flexible religious environment for a rigid Anglo-Jewish alternative where the wants of the Chief

Rabbinate were harder to ignore. Colonial success may have conferred a degree of confidence

and openness to new ideas, increasing their willingness to challenge the structures and norms of

Jewish life in the metropolis. Although London high society may have disdained parvenus from

the colonies, deep pockets and self-assurance bought influence.23 While it is less surprising that

Joseph Barrow Montefiore—first president of the Sydney synagogue and a scion of a patrician

21 The statistic is cited in McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies, 50. 22 Minutes for January 4, 1852 and May 11, 1856, A Minutes, Volume 1, Box 1, BC 849, Cape Town Hebrew

Congregation Archive. 23 On the disdain for the colonial nouveau riche, see McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies, 5.

10

family deeply embedded in communal leadership in London—became one of the two founding

wardens of the reform West London Synagogue of British Jews, Benjamin Elkin provides a more

illustrative example.24 Born in Portsea in 1783, Elkin left England at 21 for Barbados where he

prospered initially as a watchmaker, first working from a small shed, and later as a successful

general merchant. He took a leading role in the organization of the Bridgetown synagogue,

insisting that those who had taken slaves as concubines be barred from reading from the Torah,

an unpopular edict which threatened the financial position of the congregation. Elkin later

returned to England but continued to profit from the West Indian trade. In 1841 he became a

founding member of the West London Synagogue of British Jews, and a leading polemist on its

behalf in the Jewish press in England and the United States. In this latter role he sought to

differentiate the reforms undertaken in London as more restrained and halachically acceptable

than those initiated by religious reformers in central Europe, and to defend the spirituality,

rationality, and egalitarianism of the congregation (boasting that “in our Synagogue there is no

more distinction between rich and poor than in the grave” and extolling the education offered to

girls), as well as its fidelity to Talmud law. He was far removed in social status and background

from the phalanx of Montefiores and Mocattas and other patricians who made up much of the

membership of the renegade synagogue. Even in death he created a headache for the Orthodox

establishment: a dispute over the permissibility and form of his burial in the Great Synagogue

cemetery in 1848 widened the gulf between the early reformers and the Orthodox

establishment.25 Other wealthy colonists of humble backgrounds also turned their energy and

time towards charity and communal reform. Rambunctious Elias Davis, who spent some time in

Australia, was also a vocal proponent of the modernization of the management of the synagogue

and an early backer of the Sussex Hall, the Jews’ and General Literary Institution.26 Benjamin

Norden reestablished himself in London as a well-to-do philanthropist, sponsoring the Soup

24 JC, January 7, 1848; January 14, 1848; January 21, 1848. For his status as a founding warden, see Katz, Jews in

the History of England, 341. For the early proponents of establishing a separate synagogue, see Hyamson,

Sephardim of England, 280. 25 For his obituary, see JC, January 7, January 14, 1848. For his theological views, particularly on the Oral Law, see

his unsigned introduction to Morris Raphall and DA Da Sola’s Eighteen Treatises from the Mishna (London, 1842),

which he published without their permission. For evidence of his economic success in Barbados see Jacob Rader

Marcus, Memoirs of American Jews, 1775-1865 (New York, 1975), 209. For his polemics, see Benjamin Elkin,

Rejected Letters (London, 1842); idem, Letters addressed to the Editor of the ‘Voice of Jacob,’ being replies to the

observations in Nos. xxxvii and xxxix (London, 1843). For his letters to Isaac Leeser, see the Occident and American

Jewish Advocate 2, 11, February 1845; 3, 3, June 1845; 2, 1, April 1844. 26 JC, October 1,1847; Goldman, Jews in Victoria, 92.

11

Kitchen and poor visiting committees. He was stern proponent of the reform of the newly

established Board of Guardians, criticizing its patrician overseers for excluding public

accountability.27

Although greater in number and more confident in their identity as Englishmen than the

handful of Jewish expatriates from the Raj now living in London, those Jewish colonial

gentlemen who had returned from Australia and the Caribbean must have looked in wonder at

the prominence achieved by this smaller group of Jews of Indian origin. Their success belies

easy assumptions about the role of race in determining status in the metropole. None were more

famous than Arthur, Reuben, and Albert Sassoon, the sons of a merchant family that had made

an immense fortune trading opium, textiles, and cotton in India and China. Soon after moving to

England, the Sassoons started to run in the same dizzying social circles as the Prince of Wales,

joined the gentry and were awarded titles, and established a dynasty that intermarried with the

Anglo-Jewish elite. Yet for all of their social prestige and tremendous wealth, the Sassoons and

scions of other Jewish families with roots in the East arguably had less influence on Jewish life

in England than did the likes of Joseph, Norden, and Elkin. Why was this the case? And what

might this tell us comparatively about the experience of Jews in various parts of Britain’s

empire?

The nature of Britain’s expansion in Asia made it particularly dependent on middlemen.

Britain—operating until 1858 in the guise of the East India Company—maintained a light

footprint in terms of personnel, but left a deep imprint in terms of power. This was a mercantile

Empire driven, above almost all else, by profit. Its key centers—Bombay, Calcutta, Rangoon,

Singapore, Shanghai, and Hong Kong—bloomed along with the fields of cotton, poppies and tea

cultivated for trade with China and England.28 Outside of administrators, merchants, and military

men, these centers attracted relatively few British settlers, relying heavily on enterprising proxies

and intermediaries to operate effectively. This management structure created opportunities for

27 JC, January 15, 1858; March 18, 1859; April 6, 1860; February 14, 1862; April 27, 1866; Vivian Lipman, A

Century of Social Service 1859-1959: The Jewish Board of Guardians (London 1959), 25. Norden adopted other

gentlemanly pursuits, supporting the Horticultural Society. See Proceedings of the Horticultural Society, 1, 1861:

140. 28 On the growth of Bombay see Amar Farooqui, Opium City: The Making of Early Victorian Bombay (Gurgaon,

India, 2006), xiii, 8, 25, 42; Christine Dobbin, Urban Leadership in Western India: Politics and Communities in

Bombay City, 1840-1885 (London, 1972), 1-7.

12

ethnic minorities to flourish by servicing the Empire. In return, the colonial authorities provided

a relatively stable and liberal political environment, and rewarded ethnic elites for their loyalty.

The major ports of the eastern empire became multiethnic cities, home to conspicuous and

successful trading diasporas. Rival ethnic entrepreneurial networks competed and occasionally

collaborated in pursuing mercantile ventures. This cooperation sometimes stretched beyond the

business sphere. In 1839 Jewish, Parsee, Hindu and Muslim business leaders in Bombay sent a

joint petition to the Governor protesting against proselytizing Scottish missionaries who operated

in the city.29

A Baghdadi Jewish diaspora that settled in Bombay and Calcutta from the early decades

of the nineteenth century onward proved particularly adroit at ministering to the needs of the

Empire in the East. While earlier generations of Baghdadi merchants had conducted a thriving

trade with the East India Company in Surat and Madras, the most entrepreneurial of the recent

arrivals benefited from the acquisitive and mercantile-minded new imperial order.30 By the

1830s, Jews dominated the retail trade in Bombay; by the last quarter of the century they

controlled parts of the city’s trade with China and fed the voracious mills of industrial England

with cotton from the subcontinent. Like camp-followers behind an advancing army, this

Baghdadi diaspora established trading posts in each of the new territories claimed by Britain in

the East. Offshoots of this network flowered in Aden, Hong Kong31, the five treaty ports in

China32, and Lower Burma.33 A small group established a beachhead in Australia, which had

29 Dobbin, Urban Leadership, 20-22. 30 Extensive documentation about early traders at Fort St. George can be found in the Lucien Wolf Papers, HA

India, Mocatta Collection, UCL. See also Yogev, Diamonds and Coral, 67-109, 124-180; Thomas Timberg,

“Baghdadi Jews in Indian Port Cities,” in Thomas Timberg, ed., Jews in India (New York, 1986), 274-275; David

Sassoon, A History of the Jews in Baghdad (Letchwood, 1949), 204-205; Joan Roland, “Baghdadi Jews in India:

Communal Relationships, Nationalism, Zionism and the Construction of Identity,” Sino-Judaica, 4, 2003: 1; Stanley

Jackson, The Sassoons (New York, 1968), 5. 31 See Dobbin, Urban Leadership, 7, 154; Caroline Plüss, “Globalizing Ethnicity and Multi-local Identifications:

The Parsee, Indian Muslim and Sephardic Trade Diasporas in Hong Kong,” in Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, Gelina

Harlaftis and Ionna Pepelasis Minoglou, eds., Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks: Four Centuries of History (New

York: Berg, 2005), 245-268. 32 See Chiara Betta, “The Trade Diaspora of Baghdadi Jews: From India to China’s Treaty Ports, 1842–1937,” in

McCabe et al, Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks, 269-285; Chen Zhilong, “Shanghai: A Window for Studying

Sino-Indian Relations in the Era of Colonialism and Imperialism,” in Madhavi Thampi, ed., India and China in the

Colonial World (New Delhi, 2005), 33-51. 33 The Jewish community grew in step with the British conquest of Burma, which started with coastal territories

ceded in 1826, to the conquest of Lower Burma in 1852, and finally Upper Burma in 1885. Rangoon, a strategic

port, administrative centre, and transit point on the opium trade route with China was settled by a small contingent

of Baghdadis and Bene Israel, some of whom became involved in the export of rice and timber. The community

13

trading ties with both China and India.34 The most visibly successful member of this diaspora

was David Sassoon, based in Bombay, who rotated his sons between offices in China, Baghdad

and London. The branches and factories of his sprawling business network were staffed by Jews

recruited from Baghdad.35 The firm shipped opium to China, sent Bombay yarn to Lancashire

and finished piece goods to India, exported English textiles to Persia and Persian weaves to

England, supplied tea to the thirsty British market and sugar to sweet-toothed Indians. The global

reach and interconnectedness of this commodity trade was amply demonstrated during the

American Civil War. When the blockade of Confederate ports interrupted the supply of cotton to

the mills of Lancashire, the Sassoons and other exporters rushed lower quality Indian crop to

satisfy the demand. Bombay boomed while the war lasted, but suffered after Appomattox when

southern cotton returned to market and cotton prices began a precipitate decline.36

The Sassoons and other beneficiaries of the Empire in the East were heavily invested in

its success. The colonial administration was a guarantor of the safety of the mercantile elite, and

in turn relied heavily on a class known to be well disposed toward the Raj. This codependence

tightened during and after the Indian Rebellion (1857-1858). In a conspicuous act of patriotism,

David Sassoon offered to enlist a Jewish legion to support the beleaguered British. When the last

vestiges of the rebellion were crushed in July 1858, he instructed the Jews of Bombay to pray for

the royal family and to illuminate their homes in celebration. The Baghdadi synagogue in

Calcutta held a thanksgiving service. (Sassoon’s flamboyant acts of fealty may have also been

connected to the British occupation of Bushehr in 1857, a major depot for his trade with Persia.

More than ever, his economic position relied on remaining in the good graces of the imperium.)

Following the mutiny, a newly installed British colonial leadership in Bombay actively wooed

the merchant class, encouraging investment in railroads and wharfage, infrastructure that could

serve dual military and mercantile ends. Alongside its substantial capital investment—the

retained strong links to Calcutta. See Ruth Fredman Cernea, Almost Englishmen: Baghdadi Jews in British Burma

(Lanham, MD, 2007), xv-xvi, 5. 34 See Frank Broeze, “A Scottish Merchant in Batavia (1820-1840): Gillean Maclaine and Dutch Connections,” in

McCabe et al, Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks: 405-406; Jackson, The Sassoons, 5; Levi and Bergman,

Australian Genesis, 74, 268. 35 The Parsee magnates of Bombay also created extensive business networks of this kind. See Farooqui, Opium City,

27; Chiara Betta, “The Rise of Silas Aaron Hardoon (1851-1931) as Shanghai’s Major Individual Landowner,” Sino-

Judaica, 2, 1995: 4. 36 For the Civil War boom in Bombay see Dobbin, Urban Leadership, 25-26; Cecil Roth, The Sassoon Dynasty

(London, 1941), 45, 47-50, 98; Jackson, The Sassoons, 21, 24, 39-40, 44.

14

Sassoons, for example, took considerable risks developing Bombay harbor—the Baghdadi elite

developed a strong psychic attachment to Empire and its values. Sir Bartle Frere, Governor of

Bombay, recognized the utility (and dependence) of the community. Writing in 1862, he noted

that they were “like the Parsees, a most valuable link between us and the natives – oriental in

origin and appreciation – but English in their objects and associations, and, almost of necessity,

loyal.”37

The Sassoon family exemplified the acculturation of the Baghdadi diaspora. David

Sassoon appears to have not learned English and continued to use Judeo-Arabic in his business

dealings. He did however send his son Abraham to London at age fifteen to be tutored by

Hermann Adler (the future Chief Rabbi), and established ties of friendship and patronage within

the English expatriate elite in Bombay. Whatever his private convictions, Sassoon must have

been well aware that the appearance of loyalty and patriotism paid dividends. During the boom

that accompanied the American Civil War, the Bartle Frere administration pushed merchants to

fund civic projects. English and vernacular schools sprung up across the Bombay Presidency,

including the Benevolent Institution, sponsored by David Sassoon to serve the Jews of Bombay.

The school provided education in both Hebrew and English, employing the latest scientific

approach and western priorities: without vernacular instruction the children of poor migrants

would be “half educated or even quite ignorant” and hence unemployable. Sassoon

commissioned Moritz Steinschneider to produce several lavishly illustrated textbooks for the

school. Although Sassoon chose a noted German scholar for the task, the books were

unabashedly English in tone and object, containing the national anthem, prayers for the

government and Queen Victoria, and the Decalogue and Shema in English translation. This

emphasis on modern pedagogy squared with Victorian notions of scientific charity: Sassoon also

sponsored a bevy of institutions dedicated to self-improvement.38 So pronounced was his public

Anglophilia—parties to welcome arriving governors, substantial donations to patriotic causes,

sponsorship of statues to British monarchs—that one Bombay wit proclaimed his surprise that

37 See Dobbin, Urban Leadership, 23; Sassoon, Jews in Baghdad, 208; Roland, Jews in British India, 22-23;

Jackson, The Sassoons, 19; Roth, Sassoon Dynasty, 80; John Benyon, “Frere, Sir (Henry) Bartle Edward, first

baronet (1815–1884),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford, 2004). 38 See Moritz Steinschneider, ed., Reshith Hallimud: A Systematic Hebrew Primer (Berlin, 1860); Sassoon, Jews in

Baghdad, 207; Anne and Roger Cowen, Victorian Jews through British Eyes (Oxford, 1986), 57-60; Roth, Sassoon

Dynasty, 65; Roland, Jews in British India, 17-18.

15

David chose to name his daughter Mozelle rather than Victoria. In fact, there is some evidence of

his ambivalence toward acculturation. Tellingly his sons waited until his death before anglicizing

their names: Abdullah became Albert, Abraham Shalom switched to Arthur. Although the

family patriarch could slow the tide of anglicization during his lifetime, his sons embraced the

trappings and rewards of life as colonial grandees and later when they entered London society.39

The process of anglicization advanced apace elsewhere within the Baghdadi diaspora.

The trend was accelerated by the strong sense of loyalty that many Baghdadi migrants felt

toward a liberal regime that had provided ample space for the exercise of their mercantile skills.

Others, who were protectees or subjects of the British crown, were invested in its success.40

Their acculturation was expressed in a variety of ways, ranging from the private—brides who

signed Ketubot that compared the sanctity of the marriage contract with an act of Parliament at

Westminster—to the public—patriotic celebrations organized by synagogues to mark Victoria’s

birthday. In Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and Rangoon, Baghdadis quickly adopted English

as their vernacular, and sent their children to schools modeled on metropolitan institutions.41 An

unexpected corollary of acculturation was a deliberate distancing from the Bene Israel, the

community of Indian Jews who claim to have settled on the Konkan Coast before the Common

Era. As Baghdadis integrated into colonial society, they became increasingly anxious to preserve

their status and civic inclusion. This became particularly acute following the mutiny as Britons in

India become more race conscious. Yet as early as 1836, David Sassoon attempted to divide the

Jewish cemetery in Bombay into separate sections for Baghdadis and Bene Israel. These tensions

were replicated elsewhere. Arguments ostensibly relating to religious differences between the

two communities sometimes masked the Baghdadis’ efforts to underline their differences from

their Bene Israel brethren.42

39 Roth, Sassoon Dynasty, 11-13, 55, 65, 73, 118; Jackson, The Sassoons, 19, 29, 35, 46-47; Sassoon, Jews in

Baghdad, 207; Cernea, Almost Englishmen, xxii. 40 See Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Protected Persons? The Baghdadi Jewish Diaspora, the British States, and the

Persistence of Empire,” American Historical Review 116, 1, 2011: 80-108. 41 See Sassoon, Jews in Baghdad, 208, 212-13; Jonathan Goldstein, “Singapore, Manila and Harbin as Reference

Points for Asian ‘Port Jewish’ Identity,” Jewish Culture and History, 7, 2, 2004: 273-274; Joan Bieder, “Jewish

Identity in Singapore: Cohesion, Dispersion, Survival,” Sino-Judaica, 4, 2003: 31; Plüss, “Sephardic Jews in Hong

Kong”: 63, 73-74; Cernea, Almost Englishmen, xxiii, 40; Betta, “Baghdadi Jewish Diaspora in Shanghai”: 94. 42 On this issue see Joan Roland, “Baghdadi Jews in India: Communal Relationships, Nationalism, Zionism and the

Construction of Identity,” Sino-Judaica, 4, 2003: 3-6; Cernea, Almost Englishmen, 71-72, 214; Sassoon, Jews in

Baghdad, 214.

16

If Jews in Asia became eager handmaidens to their colonial rulers, why did relatively few

Jews from this portion of the Empire settle in England? The success of the Sassoons in India is

somewhat deceptive. While Baghdadis were the most conspicuous Jewish beneficiaries of the

imperial economy, the Baghdadi diaspora was itself divided by class and social status.43 The

Baghdadi community in Bombay, the sun around which a constellation of satellite communities

in Asia orbited, reflected this internal diversity. David Sassoon and his firm acted as a polestar,

drawing poor Jews from Baghdad, Damascus, and Aleppo to Bombay in search of jobs. In 1873

only 29 Jews, the majority presumably Baghdadis, qualified for a municipal franchise in that city

that was based on payment of rates exceeding 50 rupees.44 Although other Jewish sub-

communities also carved out niches that ranged from the menial—railway construction in

Mandalay or as sailors aboard the ships trading with China—to the entrepreneurial, the Empire

was stinting in doling out riches in Asia. There were, however, manifold ways of servicing the

imperial project: in Port Said and Suez, the shunting yard of the British Empire, enterprising

Jews pimped prostitutes to sailors and tourists bound for India, the Far East and Australia.45 The

Bene Israel embraced military service in the Sepoy regiments, first for the East India Company

and later in the Bombay Army. Male members of the community enlisted in considerable

numbers—the Bene Israel lived within a major recruiting area—and were deployed in imperial

wars in Persia (1855-1857), China (1856-60) and Abyssinia (1867-1868). Access to western

education opened opportunities outside of India as well. Bene Israel and Cochini Jews parlayed

their literacy in English to work as clerks and managers for British and Baghdadi firms in

Burma. Others prospered as suppliers and outfitters to the military and civil service: filling

contracts (in Burma, E. Solomon and Sons supplied water to the British navy, as well as ice to

cool the drinks of wilting Englishmen) or selling fine goods to colonials pining for home.46 But

43 See Chiara Betta, “The Baghdadi Jewish Diaspora in Shanghai: Community, Commerce and Identities,” Sino-

Judaica, 4, 2003: 82, 90-91. 44 Only 0.6 percent of the city’s male population (3,918) met these criteria, including 1,040 Parsees. The turnout of

the Jewish vote was miniscule as election held on the Sabbath. Cited in Dobbin, Urban Leadership, 173, 175; Joan

Roland, Jews in British India: Identity in a Colonial Era (Hanover, NH, 1989), 17. 45 Plüss, “Sephardic Jews in Hong Kong”: 59; Cernea, Almost Englishmen, 4; Jacob Landau, Jews in Nineteenth-

Century Egypt (New York, 1969), 37. 46 See Anthony Pamm, “The Military Services of the Bene Israel of India and the Honours and Awards Granted to

Them (1750-1918): an analysis and compilation,” 1992, unpublished manuscript, JNUL; Shellim Samuel, “Jews in

the Indian Army,” India and Israel, 4, 8, 1852: 21-24; Roland, Jews in British India, 21-23; Cernea, Almost

Englishmen, xx, 4, 8.

17

few of these opportunities promised wealth of the kind attained by the Sassoons and a handful of

other Baghdadi luminaries.

And not all Jews in the East prospered under British rule. Just as the new economic order

presented opportunity for those who were well-positioned, it could also bring disruption and

hardship for those less prepared for modernity. The introduction of the railway and telegraph in

India from the 1860s, for example, eventually allowed British merchants to bypass the agents

and middlemen – a significant number of them Jews – who had previously thrived as compradors

in the cotton trade.47 The asymmetrical impact of the Empire on Jews is seen most clearly,

however, in Aden, a Crown Colony annexed by Britain in 1839. An influx of artisans after the

annexation undercut local Jewish craftsmen with less sophisticated skills.48 The government

prohibition of the repair and construction of thatch huts, a traditional Jewish occupation, added to

the endemic poverty. At the same time, Aden’s importance as a strategic port provided numerous

new opportunities for enterprising immigrants. The Jewish population grew from roughly 250 in

1839 (a third of the town’s population) to 1,070 three years later.49 Aden attracted Jewish

refugees from Yemen, as well as merchants drawn by the town’s mercantile prospects. The port

sat athwart the sea lanes to Asia and Australia, commanding the entrance of the Red Sea and

trade routes with the Arabian peninsula. As a trade depot and coaling station, the constant traffic

of steamships presented commercial opportunities for everyone from petty entrepreneurs selling

cigarettes and trinkets to ships anchored at Steamer Point, to merchants involved in the export of

coffee to Europe and America, and international traders such as the Messa dynasty with offices

in England, China, India and the United States.50 As an administrative center with close

governmental and economic links with the Bombay Presidency, the town housed a sizeable

47 See Dobbin, Urban Leadership in Western India, 154. 48 On American designs on a Red Sea trading depot, see Emma Roberts, Notes of an Overland Journey Through

France and Egypt to Bombay (London, 1841), 103. 49 A census conducted six weeks after the conquest found 301 Jewish women and 267 Jewish men in the town. As

Kour points out, the town had already attracted immigrants from Arabia, India and the East African coast. The 1842

census found 590 Jewish males and 480 females. This shift in gender balance almost certainly reflected the arrival of

male migrants searching for work. See Zaka Kour, The History of Aden, 1839-72 (London, 1981), 21, 26. 50 See Reuben Ahroni, The Jews of the British Crown Colony of Aden: History, Culture, and Ethnic Relations

(Leiden, 1994), 34, 40-41, 46-56, 111, 319; Caesar Farah, The Sultan’s Yemen (London, 2002), 120-125; Kour,

History of Aden, 15; JC, June 17, 1859. On Jews and the coffee trade in Aden see Michel Tuchscherer, “Coffee in

the Red Sea area from the 16th to the 19th century” in WG Clarence-Smith and Steven Topik, eds., The Global

Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia and Latin America, 1500-1989 (Cambridge, 2003), 61. On the importance of trade

with the United States see Thomas Marston, Britain’s Imperial Role in the Red Sea Area, 1800-1878 (Hamden, CT,

1961), 368.

18

population of Bene Israel stationed as civil servants and soldiers.51 The census of 1872 counted

1,435 Jews from India and Burma living in the town.52 Instead of solidarity, the Jews of Aden

displayed complex communal stratification, much of it a consequence of the heterogeneous

composition of a community that included both the native-born and several foreign sub-

communities. A rabbinic emissary from Palestine who visited in 1859 noted that the Bene Israel,

who lived in a special government quarter with their wives and children, were ostracized by

other Jews.53 Those born in Aden or abroad regarded those from Yemen as religiously suspect,

and sniffed at their low status occupations as domestic servants, Torah teachers, shochets, and

laborers.54

Despite the economic and social diversity among Jews in Aden, almost the entire

community shared the kind of Anglophilia seen among Baghdadis elsewhere. To some extent,

they shared this disposition with other groups living within Aden, particularly those who had

cause to recall the devastating flooding that beset the town before the intervention of ambitious

British engineers. Jews, however, had particular reason to support the imperial presence.55

Crown rule brought a radical change to Jewish social and legal status by removing legal

disabilities and extending civil rights to the Jewish minority. With their new status came agency

and opportunity. Jews were free to travel as Crown subjects armed with British passports; some

soon visited Egypt, London and Palestine.56 They could represent their interests to the Crown,

and in turn attempt to turn imperial interests to their best advantage. And the British presence

opened new sources of livelihood, whether supplying the administration and its officers with

labor and goods, or catering to the sailors, soldiers, and visitors who passed through the town.

51 Aden may have also possessed a population of Beta Israel involved in trade with Abyssinia. Yemeni Jewry’s links

to India long predated British colonization. In 1836, visiting missionary Joseph Wolff was told by Joseph Alkaree,

chief rabbi of Sanaa, that the community was supplied with books from Joseph Samah of Calcutta. See Joseph

Wolff, Journal of the Reverend Joseph Wolff (London, 1839), 391-392. The account of Beta Israel in Aden comes

from JC, July 5, 1867, and is somewhat confused. On Aden’s place within the British Empire, see Robert Blyth, The

Empire of the Raj (London, 2003). On Yemeni Jewry’s medieval trading ties with Arabia and India, see Roxani

Margariti, Aden & the Indian Ocean Trade (Chapel Hill, 2007), 13, 19 , 22, 113, 184-188, 196-197, 203-205. 52 The census also counted 40 Persians residing in Aden, some of whom may have been Baghdadi Jews. The census

figures are provided in Frederick Hunter, An Account of the British Settlement of Aden in Arabia (London, 1877),

26. For Indian military units stationed in the town, see 142. 53 Sappir estimated that 300 Bene Israel lived in Aden. 54 JC, July 5, 1867; Ahroni, Jews of the British Crown Colony of Aden, 108, 147. 55 Ahroni, Jews of Aden, 35-37. 56 Ibid., 42, 185; JC, October 2, 1863.

19

Unsurprisingly many Jews in Aden welcomed the British occupation, and, over time,

constructed an elaborate folklore that ascribed the conquest to divine intervention and claimed an

apocryphal Jewish role in facilitating the invasion. The community came to stage an annual

celebration to mark the British victory. Their public display of loyalty went deeper than

pageantry, probably predicated on the knowledge that the British presence protected the

community against those who might resent its elevated status. Jews, for example, were key

agents in an early British spy network that ensured the colonial administration was apprised of

the intentions of inland chieftains.57 This loyalty was repaid during times of tension. When the

Muslim population of Aden rioted in 1872, the British authorities intervened to protect the

Jewish minority.58 While the Jews of Aden threw in their lot with colonial rule, they were also

influenced by the culture of the colonizers, over time adopting British naming patterns as well as

the English language.59

As the example of Aden demonstrates, the British Empire distributed its rewards

unevenly in the East. Even as some Baghdadis rose to heights unimaginable at mid-century for

Jews in the settlement colonies, they were surrounded by others whose economic ascent was

more modest and uncertain. Few among those who were psychically attached to England and its

empire could afford to retire to London. In Australia, by contrast, many more Jewish settlers

encountered opportunity for advancement, particularly once the discovery of gold transformed an

economy dependent on pastoralism into one less sensitive to the welfare of its sheep. Jews, who

clustered in the retail trade in Australia and New Zealand, rode a surging wave of demand for

clothing, textiles, and other imported goods. Although their earnings were dwarfed by the

towering wealth of the Sassoons, more acquired the means to consider a return to England than

did the average Jew in India, Burma, and Aden.

This, however, still does little to explain why those few Jews from Britain’s eastern

Empire who did settle in London in the middle decades of the century appear, despite their

superior wealth and status, to have been less inclined to push for communal change than those

who had returned from the antipodes. In large measure because their numbers were so few,

57 JC, July 6, 1866; Kour, History of Aden, 120; Ahroni, Jews of Aden, 43-45. 58 Ahroni, Jews of Aden, 89-90. 59 On westernization, see Ahroni, Jews of Aden, 143, 154, 176, 179-180.

20

returnees from the settlement colonies were a minority among proponents of reform and

modernization within Anglo-Jewry at mid-century. They appear, however, to have punched

above their weight because of their familiarity with exercising authority, their expectation and

experience of greater latitude in religious and communal affairs than was the custom in London,

and the relative freedoms granted by carrying a heavy purse. Several had played leading roles in

funding and supporting the hesitant growth of synagogues and other communal institutions in the

colonies. Energetic self-made men may have chaffed at a conservative communal leadership in

London more accustomed to noblesse oblige than to sharing power with new money. They did,

however, find allies within an increasingly assertive Jewish middle class and a Jewish press that

promoted greater accountability, transparency and professionalism among the communal

organizations that it covered. Yet some like Benjamin Norden may have discovered that religious

compromises – in his case intermarriage – that had been largely overlooked in the colonies now

acted as an impediment to exercising substantial sway within existing Jewish institutions in

England. This may add a further dimension to explaining their propensity toward favoring

religious and communal reform. With established avenues of achieving prestige and status within

Anglo-Orthodoxy restricted or blocked, they may have sought to challenge a communal elite that

thwarted their ambitions, and aid the formation of new institutions less judgmental of their

religious mores and humble backgrounds. In essence, their behavior may have been motivated at

least partly by a strategy of insurgency, seeking to open new venues for social advancement

within Jewish communal life in London.

By contrast, the Sassoons and other members of the Jewish colonial elite who moved to

the metropole from Asia encountered few of the obstacles that impeded strivers like Benjamin

Norden. Their immense wealth—the Sassoons were regarded as the “Rothschilds of the East”—

ensured an eager reception in high society; it helped that they had moved in the most exclusive

circles in Bombay and that in London the Prince of Wales liked to be surrounded by men of great

wealth. Paradoxically, the Sassoons may have had a smaller impact on the direction of Jewish

life in England precisely because of the speed with which they were coopted into an Anglo-

Jewish elite that was still defined in large measure by its adherence to religious Orthodoxy and

its Sephardi heritage. Baghdadi Jews like the Sassoon may have felt very much at home among

those Montefiores and Mocattas who sought to balance their lives as members of the landed

21

gentry with their commitment to Jewish observance. The traditionalism of Baghdadi Jews in

India and England more closely matched that of the Jewish upper crust than did the more

freewheeling forms of practice found among Jews in Melbourne, Sydney, and Cape Town. With

the sponsorship of the Sassoons, the Baghdadi community in India had created an elaborate

religious infrastructure that allowed for the maintenance of a traditional Jewish lifestyle. They

had little reason to support religious reform when they moved to England, and no need to butt

heads with an establishment that welcomed them warmly. Wealthy colonial Jews from Asia

were, therefore, very much unlike the colonial gentlemen of humbler stamp whose backgrounds

and religious compromises generated frustration and rejection when they returned to Albion.

Contrary to our expectations, it was not the Sassoons and other migrants from Asia who were

interlopers out-of-step with the Jewish life of the London elite, but native-born and Ashkenazi

Englishmen like Moses Joseph and Benjamin Norden who were the outsiders when they returned

to their homeland.